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Bird Books College Station TX

Local resource for bird books in College Station, TX. Includes detailed information on local businesses that provide access to bird books, books on bird identification, and books on bird species, as well as advice and content on bird identification, attracting certain birds, and bird trail guides.

BWD Retail Products

BWD retail products: our greatest strength is our excellent content

Backyard Booklets: a 15-booklet series!

What do you get when you cross 30 years of backyard bird expertise with millions of knowledge-hungry backyard bird watchers? The Backyard Booklet Series from Bird Watcher's Digest! With more than 4 million copies sold, this 15-booklet series covers nearly every backyard topic from bird feeding, housing, gardening, and identification to squirrels, butterflies, and bats. Each booklet is full-color, 32 pages long, and bursting with fascinating and useful information. View our list of Booklets.

The Original Birdhouse Book

Don McNeil's 30+ plans for bird houses, bird feeders, and bird baths are sophisticated enough to challenge the avid woodworker, but simple to follow with easy step-by-step instructions. Augmented by Julie Zickefoose's bird illustrations and updated in 2003 by BWD Editor, Bill Thompson, III, this book has sold thousands of copies since its original printing in 1981.

Feather Guard

Feather Guard Helps Reduce Window Strikes!

Each year millions of birds are killed in accidental collisions with glass windows and buildings. Your customers have certainly heard the sickening thunk of a bird hitting their windows. Feather Guard offers a clever, trouble-free solution to this problem.

Feed Birds the Natural Way

Natural Bird Feeding: Bird-friendly Plant Options for Your Backyard

Excerpted from the new book Feeding and Identifying Backyard Birds by Bill Thompson, III

Excerpt Topics

Letting it Go

Native versus Non-native

Bird-Friendly Plants Overview

How would you like to feed birds in the very best way possible-in a way that is all-natural, environmentally sustainable, inexpensive, and easy to do? Is that something you might be interested in? If so, get out the garden gloves and the garden trowel and leave the bird feeders and seed alone for a minute. The very best way to feed birds is to offer them the kinds of foods they would find and consume in nature, and that starts with offering bird-friendly plants.

Birds eat all manner of plant matter: seeds, berries, fruits, buds, leaves, nectar, and, of course, the insects that occur on and around plants. Every plant from the shortest lichen to the tallest old-growth tree has something edible to offer to birds. But it's hard to start a bird-friendly yard with lichens and old-growth trees.

Birds and plants have evolved together on Planet Earth. The plant grows a fruit or a seed or nectar to attract a hungry bird. The bird then returns the favor by helping the plant reproduce itself. The happens in a lot of different ways, but the two most common are as follows: Method a) a bird eats a part of a plant containing a seed-let's say it's a blackberry-digests the fruit and poops out the hard, indigestible seeds. The seeds land with a splat on the ground and, with luck and the help of the bird's natural fertilizer, a new blackberry plant will grow on that very spot. Method b) A hummingbird pokes its bill into a blossom-say a honeysuckle's-and laps up the sweet nectar deep inside. While it's drinking, the flower's pistils are dabbing pollen on the bird's head and bill. The hummingbird takes this pollen on to other flowers and other stands of honeysuckle, helping the honeysuckle to pollinate and reproduce.

If you haven't already guessed it, plants that birds use for food, shelter, or nesting are called bird-friendly plants. The most successful bird-attracting backyards are the ones that feature a well-rounded selection of bird-friendly plants in addition to feeders, birdbaths, and nest boxes. In most cases, it will be the plants that will first catch the attention of a passing bird.

On our ridge-top farm in southeastern Ohio we've planted small stands of gray birches. These are native trees to North American, but they do not occur in our area naturally. However, they survive well enough to grow about 30 feet tall. The birch family of trees is very bird friendly. The birch buds are eaten by hungry finches in the spring. The leaves seem to attract every insect and caterpillar in the book, which pleases the warblers and vireos in spring and summer. In fall, the catkins get munched on by the finches again. And the soft wood of the birch trunks is perfect for passing sapsuckers to drill sa...

Local resource for woodpecker birdhouses in College Station, TX. Includes detailed information on local businesses that provide access to woodpecker birdhouses, birdhouses, bird feeders, bird house plans, and bird house designs, as well as advice and content on bird house building, attracting birds, and bird house kids.